Senators try to keep cuts from hitting home turf

As the clock runs down, the stopgap spending bill before the Senate is looking more and more like a life raft for senators trying to protect home-state interests from the automatic spending cuts ordered under sequestration.

Alarmed by the rush, the leadership stalled action on the continuing resolution, or CR, Thursday, while it assessed the political situation. And there is a fear that if too many accommodations are made by the Senate, it risks a blowup with the House and exactly the sort of shutdown fight both parties want to avoid on March 27 when funding runs out.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Jackson Lee compares sequester to tsunami disaster

“We need to move forward cautiously but quickly,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), telling senators that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had warned he would not take a Senate bill with “a lot of junk in it.”

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said as many as 99 amendments had been filed, and Reid insisted that unless this list is pared down substantially, he plans to move ahead with a scheduled cloture vote Monday night. “One way or another we are going to move this bill forward on Monday,” Reid said.

Republicans have been most prominent in seeking relief. Sen. Jerry Moran wants to shift $50 million to protect contract air-traffic control towers important to rural states like his own Kansas. Prompted by threatened layoffs at the Tobyhanna Army Depot, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) was on the floor Thursday, proposing to add $60 million back into military operations accounts by raiding the Pentagon’s biofuels program.

But Democrats aren’t immune to the same appeals. And with major meatpacking houses in both states, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas has teamed with his Republican neighbor, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, to try to add $55 million to the current Senate bill to shore up the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

About $30 million would come from deferring maintenance on Agriculture Department buildings. But $25 million is taken from a new grant program favored by the White House to help schools buy equipment for school breakfast programs.

In House testimony this week, Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, undersecretary for food safety at the Agriculture Department, warned that sequestration will force one-day-a-week furloughs for FSIS inspectors mid-July through September. The beef and poultry industry is alarmed by the situation since packing houses can’t operate without an inspector on site. And consumers could see an increase in meat prices as supplies are reduced because of the disruption.